LINGUIST List 8.1825

Mon Dec 22 1997

Qs: Enquete de l'acceptabilite,Italian,Text

Editor for this issue: Anita Huang <anitalinguistlist.org>

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I have a degree in Foreign Languages and Literatures and a
degree in Letters. At the moment I am working in Hungary, as Italian
Lecturer at the 'Bences Gymnazium' in Pannonhalma, and from February
1998 I will be teaching Italian Dialectology and Morphology at the
'Janus Pannonius' University in Pecs. Me and some other teachers of
Italian, all of them Hungarian, namely Prof. Korompai Eszter, Toth
Laszlo, Joo Eva, are interested in working out an essay on the use of
prepositions in contemporary Italian language. We would like to focus
on both the use of a preposition in connection with a specific verb,
and the meanings of expressions differing for the preposition used,
supplying with examples, comparisons and explanations. The whole of
it should result in an enquiry with an essentially didactic purpose,
with mother tongue and foreign teachers facing together one of the
items which creates many doubts at the very beginning of the teaching
of Italian. Thus we are starting to collect material on the
matter. Could you please help us simply by providing examples of
prepositional expressions in Italian, in connection or not with verbs,
and specifying the relevant meaning, eventually out of a comparison
among slightly differing expressions? For instance, in Italian we
say: ANDARE AL CINEMA - ANDARE A TEATRO - ANDARE AL BAR - ANDARE IN
DISCOTECA - ANDARE IN BANCA - ANDARE ALLA BANCA - ... What is the
difference? Is it depending on the specific meaning of the
preposition, on the specific verb used, on the characteristics of the
place indicated by the nouns? Native speakers do not feel the need to
explain why to express themselves correctly, of course, but to teach
correctly a rational structure where to insert the information is
needed. How to shape it, if not all of the information fit in a
logical and coherent path? Let us start from listing examples,
comparisons, explanations unprejudiced; at the end of it we will se
what to do.
Thank you, Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year.
Giampaolo Poletto <bravechiostro.univr.it>, <dylandogbtk.jpte.hu>,
the latter reachable either directly or through automatic forwarding
from the former.

Holiday greetings---
In the first edition of David Crystal's delightful "Cambridge
Encyclopedia of Language," there is a statement to this effect:
Take a text, in any language, and count the words. Order the words in
terms of decreasing frequency. According to statistical prediction,
the first 15 words will account for 25% of the text. The first 100
words will account for 60%; and the first 1,000 for 85%. The first
4,000 will account for 97.5%. In short samples, however, considerable
variation from these proportions will be found. (p. 87)
Can anyone direct me to the source of this claim? I'm particularly
interested in knowing what constitutes a "short" sample, along with
the size of the smallest sample of which these statistics would hold.
(I've tried places that seemed obvious, like Zipf's "Psycho-biology of
language" and Miller's "Language and Communication," but didn't find
anything there.)
Kevin Cohen
kevincmhcsys.com